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Abstract

Background: The selenocysteine(Sec)-containing proteins, selenoproteins, are an important group of proteins present in all three kingdoms of life. Although the selenoproteomes of many organisms have been analyzed, systematic studies on selenoproteins in platyhelminthes are still lacking. Moreover, comparison of selenoproteomes between free-living and parasitic animals is rarely studied. Results: In this study, three representative organisms (Schmidtea mediterranea, Schistosoma japonicum and Taenia solium) were selected for comparative analysis of selenoproteomes in Platyhelminthes. Using a SelGenAmic-based selenoprotein prediction algorithm, a total of 37 selenoprotein genes were identified in these organisms. The size of selenoproteomes and selenoprotein families were found to be associated with different lifestyles: free-living organisms have larger selenoproteome whereas parasitic lifestyle corresponds to reduced selenoproteomes. Five selenoproteins, SelT, Sel15, GPx, SPS2 and TR, were found to be present in all examined platyhelminthes as well as almost all sequenced animals, suggesting their essential role in metazoans. Finally, a new splicing form of SelW that lacked the first exon was found to be present in S. japonicum. Conclusions: Ourdata provide a first glance into the selenoproteomes of organisms in the phylum Platyhelminthes and may help understand function and evolutionary dynamics of selenium utilization in diversified metazoans.

Additional Information

Competing Interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Author Contributions

Liang Jiang conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools.

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31070731, 21271131 and 31171233), the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant No. 2012M511590), the Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (Grant No. 10151806001000023), the Shenzhen Science and Technology Development Fund (Grant No. CXB201005240008A) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) (Grant No. 2012OHTP10). We thank the National Supercomputing Center in Shenzhen, the Supercomputer Centre of the Shenzhen University, and Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology for the use of resource of supercomputer. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

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